Milan Martic, a wartime leader of Croatia’s rebel Serbs was convicted of murder, torture and persecution today by the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
PARIS, — The U.N. war crimes court hearing cases from the former Yugoslavia today found a former henchman of president Slobodan Milosevic guilty of multiple crimes while heading a Serbian separatist rebellion and sentenced him to 35 years in prison.
Milan Martic, 52, listened motionless as the United Nations judges called him “one of the most important and influential political figures” of Krajina, the Serbian mini-state that broke off from Croatia in the early 1990’s as Yugoslavia fell apart.
They convicted Mr. Martic of crimes against humanity, including murder and persecutions and torture of Croatian civilians, and found him guilty of war crimes, including plunder and wanton destruction of civilian sites, churches, schools and entire villages. He was acquitted of “extermination,” because the killings for which he was held responsible were not on a scale to warrant the charge.
Mr. Martic was also found guilty of ordering an unjustified two-day rocket attack on the Croatian capital, Zagreb, in 1995, which killed seven people and wounded more than 200. In the days following the attacks, Mr. Martic himself had boasted of giving the orders in radio and newspaper interviews.
The defense had demanded an acquittal and described Mr. Martic as a hero and a protector of the Serb population, while prosecutors had pressed for a life sentence.
The 35-year prison term handed down is high by the standards of the tribunal, which has completed proceedings against more than 100 accused. Mr. Martic has already served 5 years, since he surrendered to the tribunal in 2002. But the judges gave him little credit for turning himself in, because by then he had been on the run for seven years, they wrote.
During his 13-month trial, Mr. Martic, a former policeman and an ardent Serbian nationalist, showed no remorse and tried to justify the violent actions of the police and paramilitary groups that he directed while minister of defense and interior and eventually as president of the self-styled republic of Krajina. The mini-state lasted from 1991 to 1995, when the Croatian military, backed by American advisors, restored Zagreb’s control.
Bakone Moloto from South Africa, who headed the three-judge panel, read out a summary of the lengthy judgment, notable because it also delivered a sharp rebuke of the top Serbian leadership in Belgrade. It described a dozen Serbian political and military leaders as being in collusion with the Krajina uprising, saying they had financed, supplied or played a part in the strategy of creating “a Greater Serbia,” of which Krajina would be a part. And it focused specifically on the role of Slobodan Milosevic, who died shortly before his 4-year trial at the tribunal ended.
Evidence had established that Mr. Milosevic “covertly” intended the creation of an enlarged Serb state by gaining control of swaths of land in Bosnia and Croatia, the judgment said. It added that doing so would be achieved by using paramilitary groups to provoke incidents, after which the Belgrade army would intervene to secure and unify the territories.
The plan eventually failed after intervention from the West. But the judgment said that Mr. Martic played a key role in that plan. It quoted Mr. Martic’s own words, from 1994, saying that he would “speed up the process of unification” and “pass on the baton to our all-Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.”
Source : www.nytimes.com
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